Cowmeat learns to drive the Volt

[cowmeat]

After driving Insights for years, you become acutely aware of the surrounding drivers, lol! I always keep them in mind & sight when I'm using regen.

And yeah, you can make tailgaters crap themselves should you ever want to! The difference between the Volt and my Insights is that in the Volt I can put it in sport mode and just lose them if I want to

Now there's an idea! Have the brake lights "flash" proportionately with deceleration rate, ie: flashing very slowly when coasting, and increasingly faster up to 100% ON when the brakes are activated.

I was thinking of a installing a "regenerating" or "charging"green LED sign in the back window as I slow. There's probably a way to power it only when the battery is getting juiced

[cowmeat]

Gave a quick training seminar to a kid in a riced out Eclipse this morning. I call it "reality" versus "perception".

He came flying up on me and then proceeded to swerve back and forth like a Nascar driver warming up the tires about three feet off my bumper. I stayed on the gas and tapped the brake pedal in an attempt to back him off a bit, but he was glued to my bumper, so I slowed down until he finally whipped around me.

As he floored it around me he "perceived" that his horribly applied body kit, bolt on wing and fart can muffler had somehow made his car faster. In "reality" I let him get next to me and then my quiet little eco car smoked his kid-engineered F&F rip off for a quarter mile down the road until I deemed it too dangerous to continue. It was a hard lesson for him, I hope he was able to drive through all the tears to his destination!

Well worth the two miles of range I sacrificed!

[ME_Andy]

Thank you for educating the public. Lol

[cowmeat]

Yeah, I'm a serious hypermiler but every once in a while I'm still willing to school a noob or two!

[KFM]

"Granny shifting instead of double clutching like you should!"

[cowmeat]

Found another personalized Florida plate that would look good on the Volt

[Ecky]

You could be like those people in the early days of the internet, buying up all of the domain names and reselling them for outrageous sums.

[cowmeat]

Added another mile to the estimated range I get on a full charge this morning.

I now get 11 more miles of estimated range than I did when I bought the car a couple of months ago. It started out showing the standard 35 miles of range, so I'm pretty sure the lady that owned it before me wasn't a hypermiler!

[NoD~]

I don't know how a Florida winter is (I'm guessing you don't see "freezing" temps, lol), but has the drop in temps dropped your mileage as well? I don't think electric engines are effected like a traditional ICE, but there's still rolling resistances as well as increased drag, so I'm curious.

[cowmeat]

Yeah, we don't see much cold weather here, "freezing" for me is anything below 60 degrees
I think what affected my range those couple of cold days was the defroster, which in an EV is all electric. It siphoned a couple miles of range off before I had even moved the car.
I heard you can "precondition" the Volt for heat/defroster while it's being charged, but when I read about it in the manual it said it'll still use some kWh if you charge with the 120v cable like I do.

BTW, I found out yesterday why my car has been fogging up so bad. The culprit was the sunshade that I have been tucking into the doors. When it rains the straps on the sunshade wick some water into the car and in the morning this becomes fog.
I won't be using it any time they're predicting rain in the future